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ONTAP 8.0.1 RC1 Available

September 3, 2010 By mike View Comments

The NOW site shows ONTAP 8.0.1 RC1 available for download as of today: https://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/software/ontap/8.0.1RC1/

At the time of this post all the links for release notes show a page not found, hopefully more information will be available shortly.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Filed Under: ONTAP Tagged With: NetApp, ontap

NetApp Flash Cache and 64 bit Aggregates

May 26, 2010 By mike View Comments

I was talking with a local NetApp SE the other day and the subject came up about the Flash Cache (formerly Performance Acceleration Module, or PAM) card and 64 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8.0 The issue, he told me, is that currently the Flash Cache cards are not compatible with 64 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8 – however they do work with 32 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8 and of course in ONTAP 7G.

I wasn’t able to find anything on the NOW site to confirm or deny this, he mentioned this only affected the newer PCIe based Flash Cache cards (256GB and 512GB) the older, original PAM card (16GB) does work with 64bit aggregates.

The only thing I can find on the NOW site that talks about 64bit aggregates with PAM is from TR-3786:

10.6 PERFORMANCE ACCELERATION MODULE

A Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) can optimize the performance of your random read intensive workloads such as file services and messaging. PAM works with 64-bit aggregates as well as 32-bit aggregates and caches data that is coming from volumes located in both types of aggregates. PAM caches data based on data access regardless of the aggregate type.

The data cached in PAM while the system is in operation depends on the workload, and it can be a combination of data from volumes contained in different aggregates. There is no way to let PAM cache data only from a particular aggregate type. As noted in other sections of this document, 64-bit aggregates have a bigger address space and also take more memory for their metadata than 32-bit aggregates. This might reduce the total amount of effective data that can be cached in PAM when used with 64-bit aggregates present in the system.

However since they are referring to it as PAM and not Flash Cache I’m not sure if they are talking about the 16GB card that the NetApp SE said would still work or if this document is saying the newer card will work too and just hasn’t been updated to reflect the new product name. Anyone out there able to shed some light on this? I would love to know the details.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Filed Under: Featured, NetApp, ONTAP

Use ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode Simulator on ESX

March 12, 2010 By mike View Comments

If you want to use the ONTAP 8.0 7-mode simulator in ESX the process is actually pretty simple, personally I wish NetApp would just offer an OVF format for the simulator but anyways…

Create a new VM in the vSphere Client and select Custom, assign a name to the VM, a resource group and select the datastore to place the VM files on. Then you will be at the Virtual Machine Version screen.

Select Virtual Machine Version 7 and click Next

Select Other and choose FreeBSD 64bit from the drop down and click Next

Select 2 Virtual CPUs and click Next

Assign 2 GB RAM and click Next

Chose 4 NICs, in my case I placed the 1st and 3rd NIC on my VM network and the 2nd and 4th NIC on the Storage Network. Click Next

Leave the default on SCSI controller and click Next

Select Do Not Create Disk and click Next

Click Finish

Now you need to copy the .vmdk files(including the cf card folder) from the ZIP into the directory you created the FreeBSD VM. After you do that go into the VM properties and add hard disk choosing Use an Existing Virtual Disk. Browse to the VM location.

The first disk you want to add is the larger of the two with ‘cf’ in the name, after you add this disk add the other disk as well (I used default options for IDE controller etc).

That’s all there is to it, from this point you can follow the manual to setup the simulator.

After you power it on press ctrl-c and then select option 4.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Filed Under: NetApp, ONTAP Tagged With: NetApp, netapp simulator, ONTAP 8.0

Verify NetApp clusters with cf-config-check

February 22, 2010 By mike View Comments

A handy tool to use to verify the configuration of both NetApp controllers in a cluster is HA Configuration Checker. This tool will check licenses, network configuration and options on each system to make sure there isn’t a problem during a cluster takeover. Running the script is pretty simple, there is a .cgi and a .exe version.

By default it uses RSH to communicate to the NetApp controllers, personally I like to use SSH which just requires adding the -s into the command. Another thing to be aware of, if you don’t specify the user when using SSH it will use the username you are currently signed in with on the computer it is being run from. In my case that user doesn’t exist on the NetApp controllers so I used the root user.

Pretty helpful, and from this I can see I need to add a FlexClone license and fix my e0 interface or things depending on it may not work in a takeover situation.

NetApp System Manager can also do some basic alerting on issues like these as well, when I removed the FlexClone license from one of my filers you can see the on screen alert.